Second hand bookworm loot

Today's venture out of doors took me to that most tantalising of pleasure emporiums for a bookworm ... Oh the heady, sensuous delights of the second hand bookshop!

To the uninitiated there is so little going on, a few terribly ordinary looking people in drab street clothes perusing the stock of a slightly musty, down at heel shop. Shabby, unmatched shelving bending under crowds of old, well thumbed books with peeling pencil inscribed price stickers. Little happening and even that to an uninspired soundtrack of infrequently rustling pages, a dusty cough, the thrum of a finger run along a line of book spines like a stick along railings and very, very rarely a few mumbled words and the unfashionable, mechanical Kerching! of an old till.

This is the superficial, the obvious, the visible, but there is so much more to experience here in this special, magical place. To those of us abandoned in dusty libraries as children and raised by the books themselves - adopted by gregarious, child friendly Box Sets or noisy, messy clans of ghost written franchises or inducted into the aesthetical brotherhood of a Literary Imprint - to such as we this is a seraglio of potential partners! Some are known to us, at least by reputation, we came here seeking them, longing for them, our desires heightened by the endurance of our quest, by the many disappointments and missteps and now is the moment of blissful consummation. Others are strangers, our glances meet as we explore the crowd and suddenly there is a gasp of serendipitous pleasure, fingers encounter firm linen covers or smooth grained leather bindings and we are captivated, lost.

New books are exciting, virginal, fresh. They exude the intoxicating pheromone of glue and hot presses. Their pages are trim, tight, close ordered, unprobed by other fingers, sharp as the guillotines that shaped them. Old books, used books have different attractions. Their covers may be wrinkled, their jackets torn and stained, their pages loose but they have experience. Learn to move slowly through the outer garments of their end papers and you will find book plates telling of past honours, dedications carrying encouragement, gratitude and affection, gently handle their tired pages and sagging spines and they will repay you by falling open to share favourite poetry and prose. Even in the page defacing, scribbled notes in margins there is the forbidden excitement of another mind beside the reader and the author, a threesome of minds, perhaps even more! An inhibition shedding intellectual orgy!